Fantastics, And Other Fancies [Paperback]

Lafcadio Hearn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 29, 2008

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

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The 19th-century writer Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) is now far better known in Japan than in the U.S., but he once had fame in America, chiefly for his 1887 collection Some Chinese Ghosts and 1904's Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (the basis of the 1964 film Kwaidan). Fantastics and Other Fancies (1914) is a posthumous collection of 36 early works which, because of their brevity (the longest by far is 16 pages) and their lushly romantic style, might more accurately be described as prose poems. These often-supernatural short-shorts were written for New Orleans newspapers and rescued from obscurity by Hearn's friends and admirers; the majority are from the pages of the Daily Item, and six are from the Times-Democrat.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a number of Hearn's short-shorts are dreams; in "The Idyl of a French Snuff-Box," the art on the box lid inspires a dream as fascinating and as sadly interrupted as Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," while "The One Pill-Box" presents the struggles of a man trapped in a fever dream. A few of Hearn's sketches are twice-told tales; "Aida" summarizes Verdi's opera with impressively rich brevity, while "The Devil's Carbuncle" retells a South American legend of greedy Spanish invaders and an accursed gem. Short-shorts like "Hereditary Memories," "When I Was a Flower," and "Metempsychosis" explore reincarnation. "The Fountain of Gold" is a fairy tale about a Spaniard who finds love and the fountain of youth, and still is not content. In "The Ghostly Kiss," a masterpiece of chilling horror, a man is mysteriously compelled to kiss a beautiful stranger at a vast theater and discovers he is in a quite different and far more dreadful place. "A River Reverie" was inspired by the New Orleans visit of a famous contemporary, Mark Twain. "Hiouen-Thsang," an example of the Orientalia for which Hearn would gain fame, follows a Buddhist's dangerous journey to distant India to revive the faith in his native China.

Melancholy, obsessed with the "twin-idea of Love and Death," and haunted by ghosts, classical gods, and beautiful, often dead or dying women, Hearn's "fantastics" and "fancies" are gothic in a sense far removed from black-leather-clad club-hoppers in vampire dentures, but it would not be surprising to learn these doom-laden, atmospheric pieces were an influence on New Orleans's modern-day queens of horror, Anne Rice and Poppy Z. Brite. --Cynthia Ward --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 252 pages
• Publisher: Ward Press (February 29, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1408645564
• ISBN-13: 978-1408645567
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Classic collection of fantasy stories., November 9, 2000

By 

John Betancourt "Publisher Guy" (Rockville, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Fantastics and Other Fancies (Wildside Fantasy) (Paperback)

LOVE AND DEATH IN NEW ORLEANS . . .

"I am conscious they are only trivial," wrote Lafcadio Hearn from New Orleans in 1880 to his friend H. E. Krehbiel, speaking of the weird little sketches he was publishing from time to time in the columns of the Daily Item, the New Orleans newspaper which first gave him employment in the city where he spent the ten years from 1877 to 1887. "But I fancy," he goes an, "that the idea of the fantastics is artistic. They are my impressions of the strange life of New Orleans. They are dreams of a tropical city. There is one twin idea running through them all - Love and Death. And these figures embody the story of life here, as it impresses me."

36 stories by Lafcadio Hearn

Introduction by Charles Woodward Hutson

Other books in the Wildside Fantasy Classics series (all highly recommended) include:

The Witch of Prague, by F. Marion Crawford One of Cleopatra's Nights, by Theophile Gautier Some Chinese Ghosts, by Lafcadio Hearn The Well at World's End, by William Morris The Phantom Ship, by Capt. Frederick Marryat